A Sud­den Glimpse to Deep­er Things review – effu­sive ode to Willie Barns-Graham

Mark Cousins doc­u­men­taries always orig­i­nate from a deeply sub­jec­tive posi­tion. Poet­ic voiceovers and asso­cia­tive form shape his films as visu­al essays, artic­u­lat­ing an inher­ent ten­sion in doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing: that of ques­tion­ing the nature of get­ting to an ​“objec­tive truth” and its prox­im­i­ty to a sub­jec­tive projection.

Cousins places this ten­sion front and cen­tre in his lat­est film, A Sud­den Glimpse to Deep­er Things, an artist por­trait of Scot­tish mod­ernist painter Wil­helmi­na (Willie) Barns-Gra­ham. The film opens with a pho­to­graph of the artist in the lat­er stages of her life, ask­ing us to pon­der how much we learn from this image, as opposed to how much we project onto it. Nat­u­ral­ly, the fol­low-up ques­tion this prompts is, how close can the doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er get to their sub­ject, espe­cial­ly posthumously?

Barns-Gra­ham was born in St Andrews to a fam­i­ly of land­ed gen­try and she relo­cat­ed to Corn­wall in the ​’40s where she was to become a sig­nif­i­cant part of the St Ives group. Cousins address­es that she was major­ly side­lined as a woman artist; she also had synes­the­sia, a neu­ro­log­i­cal con­di­tion where sen­so­ry infor­ma­tion is inter­pret­ed in the brain as colour. Colours become asso­ci­at­ed with let­ters, num­bers, peo­ple, places, visu­al sen­sa­tions, which we see by being immersed in scans of her note­books. Page upon page of let­ters mapped onto shades on intri­cate, colour-cod­ed grids, shapes, flour­ish­es and math­e­mat­i­cal­ly con­ceived arrange­ments show­cas­ing a very unique fas­ci­na­tion with the nat­ur­al world. Cousins embraces this vast body of work through lengthy slideshows, accom­pa­nied by Lin­da Buckley’s con­tem­pla­tive string score. Else­where, Til­da Swin­ton reads pas­sages from the artist’s diaries and let­ters, and art his­to­ri­an Lynne Green, who authored a book on the artist, shares her reflections.

It’s clear that Cousins sees his sub­ject as a kin­dred spir­it, adopt­ing a for­mal struc­ture akin to Barns-Graham’s free­wheel­ing way of see­ing. We even fol­low the film­mak­er as he goes to get one of her draw­ings tat­tooed, but in these instances, him being an author who insists so much on the ​“I” can lim­it the scope of his work. A sequence in which he sus­pects that a paint­ing he acquired at an auc­tion might be fake appears as a loose thread.

A vis­it to the Grindel­wald glac­i­er (a big inspi­ra­tion for Barns-Gra­ham) becomes an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reflect on the effects of cli­mate change that’s all too brief, as in place of the frozen landscape’s sheer phys­i­cal pres­ence, Cousins’ cam­era finds a glac­i­er that has retreat­ed by a mile and is almost gone. But these nev­er feel awk­ward or shoe­horned in. As much as this is an ode to an artist neglect­ed by the annals of main­stream art his­to­ry, it’s also about anoth­er artist’s per­son­al fix­a­tion, affin­i­ty, and desire to get as close as pos­si­ble to their subject.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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